The Journey Of Bartholomew The Photon

Bartholomew is a photon. He was born on the sun. He went through many changes, but let’s start at day one. Deep in the core of the sun a baby photon was produced. His name was Bartholomew. From the very second he was born, Bartholomew (Barry for short), started his very long journey to Earth. At the time of Barry’s birth, the hydrogen atoms that made up most of the Sun’s mass were having huge conflicts. They all had too much energy and ideas to stay together and agree on something. So as a result they split into protons and electrons.

This created plasma. One day, while on his way to the playground he collided with a deuterium atom. Barry immediately turned into a helium-3 and then got released as a gamma ray. He raced home and told his mother and father what happened. They were afraid so they told him that the only way to stay safe was to go to Earth. He felt extremely energized and soared out of the core of the sun and into the radiative zone. He only looked back once. The radiative zone gets its name from its method of heat transfer: the radiation of light. As Barry left the core of the sun and entered the radiative zone, he was faced with a big problem: tightly packed protons. Barry started to think of way to get through the protons, but he couldn’t come up with anything. He decided that he would just have to try to make it through no matter how long it took. He had come too far to turn around now. Bartholomew learned the hard way that everytime he hit a proton he lost some of is energy and was thrown in different directions. It was hard to slow down. After all he was going through the sun at such a fast pace, but to ensure that he was able to make it to earth he slowed down his pace.

The journey was long and treacherous. He was all alone and afraid. He longed for his family and friends. Barry considered turning around but he wasn’t sure if his city would still be here. After all, his parents had sent him to Earth to be safe. A few thousand years passed before Barry ever saw anything other than protons again. Once he emerged his photon heart was filled with joy, knowing that the hardest part was over and the best was yet to come. Bartholomew entered the convection zone. It was the final layer of the sun. Barry was relieved to find out that the convection zone wasn’t as dense as the radiative zone. Here, he wouldn’t run into as many atoms. He soon learned that his time bouncing around in the radiative zone helped him because it caused him to shift to the visible spectrum. Finally, after millions of years after bartholomew the photon was born, he finally broke free from the inside of the Sun. After a few moments of hesitation, Barry left the surface of the sun and began his journey through the Sun’s multi-layered atmosphere. Barry went through the photosphere first, and then entered the chromosphere. Suddenly the temperature started to rise drastically as he made his way through the corona.

The temperature was much hotter than what he was used to. Barry started to sweat. He didn’t see a lot of anything, just a couple electrons here and there. Once he was out of the corona he saw it; Earth. He was overjoyed knowing that his long journey was almost over and he was almost at his new home. Barry heard other squeals of delight so he turned around. He was surprised to find millions and billions of other photons right behind him on the same journey as him. It took about 8 minutes for Barry to travel across 93,000,000 miles of galaxy. Once he got to the Earth’s atmosphere, he dodged and tried to avoid space debris and passed straight through the atmosphere (due to his red wavelength). Excitement bubbled inside of him as he became closer and closer to the surface. Once Barry arrived at Earth (Specifically a neighborhood called Bel Air), Barry made contact with the lens of an eye. That’s when he was focused on a small spot on the retina of the eye. There, Barry was finally absorbed by a protein inside of a cone cell. The cell sent an electrical signal to the brain and marked the end of the long journey of Bartholomew the photon.